Almost Rapist: A True Crime Memoir (Enthusiast Press, 2025) is a debut, high-concept, dark-humor memoir set against the backdrop of the Great Recession when Jöyce, a lapsed cult member and recent NYU acting school graduate whose parents have just lost their house and spent six months at an extended-stay motel during the mortgage crisis, lands a Craigslist job assisting an Oscar and Grammy winning composer, following his near-deadly stroke, on the eve of what she finds out is his Supreme Court rape trial.
While her employer laments his physical recovery as the sole obstacle to his artistic and romantic comeback, Jöyce unravels accumulating sexual-assault charges from newspaper articles as reporters appear near his Upper East Side apartment. Legal inquiries ... surveillance ... deception ... private investigators posing as lovers and victims...murder and greed...all converge in this stunning read about a diametrically opposite, impossibly fated odd couple forced to grapple with the dark side of the entertainment industry.
A wildly humorous memoir written with a painstaking commitment to accuracy over the span of years, Almost Rapist is a New York story chronicling culturally and historically significant criminal charges against a looming central character, representing core reckonings of early 21st century thinking, countered by the equally poignant circumstances of the narrator. Without meaning to, and from a position of vast wonder, the story draws a precise, hypocognitive, bimbo-lectual sampling of the exact moment when rape culture, the resilience of popular-achievement mythology, and economic inequality began to gather for public examination.
